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Title: Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0-19-503354-X Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: September, 1983 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Ivy League "radicalism"
Comment: This book (and the previous review) seems to typify just how far Nietzsche has penetrated into academe and what strange poses he is being forced to take. When Bloom states that "the language...of criticism ought to be pragmatic and outrageous..."(p.19) we wonder if he is really aware of the contradiction in such a viewpoint. For, as the high priest of pragmatism, William James, frequently stated "pragmatism [is] a mediator and reconciler..."(Pragmatism Chapt. 1). Pragmatism, in other words, is an elaborate justification of conformity. It may not be pragmatic at some time to epater le bourgeoise and it is certainly not outrageous to mediate or reconcile. The Yale professor is trying to square the circle. This paradox runs through the work as, on another occasion, we're told that "it [ie. the work in question] cannot become the American religion until it first is canonized as American literature" (p.150). Jeremiah must become a literature professor at Yale, it would seem. Bloom's (and our ecstatic reviewer's) blindness to this problem is difficult to account for.
Returning to our opening claim, Bloom's desire to outrage is rooted in his admiration of Nietzsche's glorification of the poetic soul freely creating worlds ex nihilo. We point out in-passing that his avowed opponents, the franco-heideggerian deconstructionists, also trace their roots to this philosopher. What we appear to be reading is an academic quarrel among tenured radicals who are trying to figure out whether they must eat the little end or the big end of the egg first. For Bloom, "the true ship is the shipbuilder" and "right reading is not reading well" (p.20). Rather than creating worlds ala Nietzsche, Bloom believes in creating interpretations. When we read and interpret we produce a text which is itself a "misreading" of the text we are attempting to read. Misunderstanding is more important than comprehension and the job of the critic is to provoke, rather than to explain. [In this respect he is in union with his academic "targets."] The sad fact here is, however, that there is no way to determine a sound from an unsound reading, an accurate one from a child's scrawlings on a napkin (p.16). This is the night in which all cows are black and Nietzsche's philosopher suffers from the same incoherence, only he attempts to seek refuge in the classification of interpretations as "noble" and "base." Since noble and base are judgments made by others, they are as arbitrary as the creations they purport to laud or condemn. No one has yet successfully unified James and Nietzsche; convention and radicalism.
If we pay attention to the attempts at "criticism" in the work we are thoroughly disheartened to discover that Bloom has chosen to ignore the obvious in favor of the ridiculous. While dismissing the blatant Hegelianism of Emerson, he prefers to run him through the Freudian meat grinder in an attempt to reclaim the Concord sage as 100% American. The silliness of such an activity should be self-explanatory. Bloom, of course, would not object to this characterization since "misreading" is more important than understanding (p.16). It is odd that he expresses such faith that his critics will, one day, understand him. "Upon what evidence do you make such a claim," we ask. Again, the longing for public acceptance overrides the desire to be "outrageous." On a more serious note, the need for Bloom to marshall the various and oppositional forces of gnosticism, kabbala, psychoanalysis and pragmatism bespeaks a reader's sensibility which is fundamentally impoverished. His heroes, Johnson, Empson, Wilde, and Pater felt no need to adopt an alien method or religion because they saw themselves as reconnecting with the work and brushing away the sediment of dull, received opinion. Kabbalah and gnosticism insist that God is "x" but pragmatism believes that it only matters if we act upon it and psychoanalysis tells us that the whole thing is just a defense mechanism to deal with the difficulties of living. Why the Yale professor chose to ignore this obvious incompatibility is deeply troubling for it speaks volumes about the quality of scholarship in our most elite universities.
Rating: 5
Summary: In Defense of Bloomian Wildness (i.e. Pragmatism)
Comment: What are the prerequisites for performing a strong reading of this strongest of critics? Wherefore the mirth and mettle to become equal to Bloom's (at times) terrifying paradigmata for the belated student of literature? Bloom acknowledges Neil Hertz for likening his books to a perverse blend of Piransi and Rube Goldberg, dismissing our critic's oeuvre as a scatterbrain "melange of homemade contraptions and imaginary spaces." Bloom's response to this is characteristically funny and ingenious, not to mention invigorating. "I accept this but universalize it.... The triumphant point of a Rube Goldberg is not that it is a twittering machine, or that it goes through amazing, far-fetched convolutions in order to perform a simple operation in a howlingly complicated way, BUT THAT IT WORKS -- not by getting the job done, but by an audacious inventiveness that exposes, however parodistically, the truth that the job's aim cannot be distinguished from its origins"(45). A critical pragmatist will derive the means of his analysis out of the special requirements demanded by the text under review. If, for example, the poetry of William Blake seems to call for the disinterment of certain secular religious traditions (whether Gnostic, Kabbalistic, or Freudian), the critic has every incentive to explore and enlarge upon these paradigms, to bring the spiritual history of mankind to bear upon the younger text. Virtually all of Bloom's detractors refuse to come to terms with his bare-bones speculative Pragmatism, wherein a theory's "truth" lies in its workability and use-value, rather than on a logical schemata of spec and modelization. "Poetry and criticism are useful not for what they really are, but for whatever poetic and critical use you can usurp them to, which means that interpretive poems and poetic interpretations are concepts you make happen [poetry], rather than concepts of being [philosophy]"(39). The transmittance of power from master to ephebe entails the birth-pang zero-hour of "catastrophe-creation," a breaking open of the visionary structure in order to reassemble oneself into a stronger, more originary consciousness, where the ephebe must come to terms with the epistemological brainwashing performed on him by Academe, by his previous, idealizing views of literature and the arts, by friends, family, and other institutional bric-a-brac which mediate (and derange) the Gnostic self, the soporific realm of our Lethean, amnesiac culture. Bloom's criterion is elitist and solitary, the nonpareil of a re-visionary Gnosticism which he's powerfully and complexly developed over the past thirty years.... And as any student of religious tradition can attest, one should *never* (as the previous reviewer has) mistake spiritual difficulty for theoretical vagueness, which is to say, unless one has read and reread all of Bloom from *Anxiety*(1973) to *Omens*(1996), he or she should refrain from making superficial judgements on this, one of the most advanced critical endeavors undertaken since Northrop Frye....
If all of this sounds like hero-worship, the youthful ramblings of a bright-eyed readerly lap-dog (and it probably is), I would only urge the potential reader not to *underestimate* the range of difficulties, both cognitive and spiritual, which Bloom requires of his (ideal) readers, a difficulty blundered through and misconceived by virtually every philosophy major I've encountered. Bloom believes that philosophy is "a stuffed bird" dead on the mantlepiece, that the American academic attempt to conflate Logic and Philosophy into a single, arch-pedantic discipline has nothing interesting to say about the exigencies of poetic apprenticeship. "If we ever get a rigorous philosophy of the Lie, then we may be close to a useful philosophy of poetry"(41). What truly matters in the best poetry, criticism, and philosophy does not need to be strictly "differentiated" in the first place. If one truly needs a philosophical explanation circumscribing the "difference" between poetry and theory, then I would recommend Chap. 7 of Deleuze & Guattari's *What is Philosophy?*. (But as Bloom might say, "Deleuze's problems are not MY problems.") Only a scholarship that reads itself AS literature can become equal TO literature, a stance which can never be assimilated by the philosophical overconfidence which characterizes contemporary Academe. Bloom's central objective in his theoretical phase (1973-1982), as I map it, is to explore and elevate paradigms for reading, to elaborate new slants on "old" traditions, to revivify the art of memory to selectively "free" ourselves from the daemon of Anteriority. The previous reviewer, in an agony of illiterate pedantry, is looking for "theses" to be proved or disproved, "arguments" to be exposed and deconstructed as hypocritical and self-refuting, logic-puzzles to be foreordained and then definitively solved. Professor Bloom, in the line of Hazlitt and Pater, is much too ahead of the game aesthetically to be dragged down by such a-pragmatic resentment. If one wishes to "refute" Bloom, he or she must provide stronger, more productive readings of the specific texts under review (Blake, Freud, Emerson, Whitman, Lindsay, Stevens, Crane, Ashbery, Hollander, and their peers), and not build a polemical soapbox out of irrelevancies such as Bloom's purported failure to articulate the "difference" between the poem and the concept. Was this really Bloom's objective, after all? In the postmortem realms of academic philosophy, a misplaced punctuation-mark can tear down an entire argument, a fatal mote of dust can devastate the whole architectonic machine of logic and rationality. Bloom's theories are only as "correct" as they provide useful paradigms for reading, as they enliven the reader's perception of the text, as they grant power to the suffering ephebe. It would seem to me that the previous reviewer has spent a lot more time reading "theory" than actual novels, poems, plays, short stories, and so is not in a position to play the radical game Bloom has been cultivating in book after book. Strong poetry requires strong readers to carry on the struggle, not pseudo-philosophical pedants piddling after nonexistent truth-functions.
Rating: 3
Summary: A club masquerading as a lantern
Comment: While Professor Bloom provides us with many ideas he seems to have mistaken the David for a junk pile at a flea market; careful exposition for cocktail-party twaddle. The major "thesis" of the work, called "revisionism," is that all poetry (meaning those poems which the author cites within the work) is an attempt to articulate meaning against both previous articulations and the abyss of the cosmos. The notion that all poetry is born of struggle is neither new nor revelatory; importing gnosticism and Freud into the commentary only muddies the waters. Struggle is not the same as "catastrophe" (a term he never defines) and incorporeal, intelligible structure is not the same as the yawning abyss. Professor Bloom also seems to conflate the seeing eye which views the cosmos and the touching hand which "feels" the cosmos hence, he is blind to the numerous references to vision in Emerson and others in favor of his pet thesis, all knowing is a grasping and deforming. Ironically, as he lashes out at the deconstructionists and the Lacanians for their inability to explain one or more art forms he, himself, is unable to conduct a serious, sustained reading of philosophy or literature. Indeed, the good professor never articulates the "difference" between poetry and philosophy. This fatal flaw renders the rest of his "radical" reading so much bric-a-brac. Perhaps we could turn his "reading" back upon himself and ask the honorable professor what sort of pre-adolescent "catastrophe" he is attempting to defend himself from by the creation of such an elaborate "theory of reading" or, even more on point, what type of "catastrophe" a Freudian "catastrophe theory" is attempting to work through.
The major benefit of the book is in its passionate argument that all poetry is indeed an attempt at articulating the structure of an otherwise mute cosmos. The rest is a procrustean coffin.
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Title: A Map of Misreading by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0195162218 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom ISBN: 0195112210 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: March, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Hamlet: Poem Unlimited by Harold Bloom ISBN: 157322233X Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 10 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation by Harold Bloom, William Golding ISBN: 067167997X Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: May, 1992 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (Centennial Edition) by Hart Crane, Marc Simon, Harold Bloom, Mark Simon ISBN: 0871401789 Publisher: Liveright Pub. Date: May, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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